1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to user interface menus in computers and electronic devices and, more particularly, to methods, systems, and computer program products for controlling how contact information is provided to computer applications.
2. Background and Relevant Art
The term “contact,” as described herein, generally refers to any person, group, organization, business, household, or other type of identifiable entity. The term “contact information,” as defined herein, generally refers to any information that corresponds to a contact and that may be considered relevant for identifying, contacting, accessing, corresponding or communicating with the contact. In the context of the present application, contact information is used by an application to perform a desired function, such as, for example, sending an email, initiating a telephone call, accessing a website, initiating a gaming session, performing a financial transaction, and so forth. Non-limiting examples of contact information include names, aliases, telephone Me numbers, email addresses, home addresses, instant messaging (IM) addresses, and web addresses. Contact information can also refer to other types of information such as the status of a contact. For example, information indicating a contact is currently online, or on a telephone line may also be broadly considered as contact information.
Many applications require, access, transmit, or otherwise utilize contact information. Examples of some applications that utilize contact information include email applications, network gaming applications, instant messaging applications, telephone and telephony applications, Internet applications, financial applications, word processing applications, and business management applications.
Applications that utilize contact information typically provide interfaces or menus for entering desired contact information within one or more fields. For example, an email interface will typically include fields for receiving the email addresses of the intended email recipients. Contact information can also be gathered without the user's express knowledge. For example, with regard to the email application, contact information corresponding to the sender (i.e., the sender's name, email address, etc.) can be gathered behind the scenes, without requiring user input and sometimes even without the user's knowledge.
The contact information that is gathered by an application can then be published or otherwise used and sometimes without the user's express knowledge or consent. This can be very undesirable, particularly when the user has no intent for their contact information to be gathered at all.
Allowing applications to automatically gather contact information about a user can also be problematic, even when a user has provided implied or actual consent to the application to gather their information. For example, if a single computing system is shared by multiple people, the computing system may have access to different contact information for each of the people that share the computing system, thereby increasing the possibility that an application can obtain the wrong contact information for any particular person using the computing system at any particular time.
Yet another problem in the art is that existing applications typically do not expressly notify the user what the gathered contact information is going to be used for. This can make it difficult for a user to decide if they are willing to provide the requested contact information. Even if a user could eventually find such information by navigating to related web pages or to help menus that are associated with the application, this is undesirable, particularly if the user does not immediately know where to begin looking for such information. Accordingly, users typically have to make uninformed decisions about whether they want to provide their contact information or not.
Yet another problem in the art is that even if a user does consent to the gathering and use of their contact information, the computing system may not know which contact information to gather about a user. In particular, a user may have different sets of contact information or ‘personas’ that correspond to different environments in which they live. For example, a user may have a family persona, a school persona, a friends persona, a work persona, a recreational persona, and so forth, each corresponding to different aliases, addresses (e.g., physical/email), telephone numbers, and so forth. However, because an application may not know which information the user would prefer to have gathered, the wrong information may inadvertently be gathered and published or otherwise used by the application.